So about a year ago, Grou.ps founder Emre Sokullu and his team started thinking about the future of the service and realized that about 40 percent of Grou.ps’ customers were in the health and fitness category, which was also one of the few areas where the company was seeing growth and where attrition was lower than in other areas.

Social networks have erupted in popularity in the last 15 years; companies like Myspace and LinkedIn soon became household names. Today, facebook has over 800 million active users and counting. It quickly became clear that social networks could be used for more than connecting with friends; they could connect employees, community groups, and the unemployed with potential employers.

White label social networking platform GROU.PS is the latest to join the increasingly crowded “private networks for posting about babies” space (we may need a better title for this…), which has been heating up as of late. The company has just launched a new mobile app called Babyzilla on both iOS and Android, which allows families to privately communicate, post updates, chat, and share photos, videos, stories and more.

There’s been a lot of talk on the concept of minimum viable product lately, but not much has been written on how to actually implement one. Having gone through the process of developing one of the earliest social software mashups (GROU.PS) in PHP six years ago, and LoveBucks, a node.js Javascript app that is the Facebook “Like” Button for online content monetization (both alone), I want to describe to you a little bit what has really changed in web application development in recent years and the beauty of minimum viable product.

Making money in the online content business isn’t always easy, especially for publishers and bloggers who don’t have huge audiences. Besides advertising, there aren’t too many options for online publishers and even though it looked like micropayments would offer a solution a few years ago, they never caught on with the public. Today, the white label social networking service Grou.ps is taking a stab at solving this problem. It’s launching a new program called LoveBucks that allows users to buy a monthly subscription (starting at $6.95/month) and then lets them spend this money by clicking on the LoveBucks widgets on sites that sign up for the program.

Social groupware platform GROU.PS has just introduced several new features, the most notable of which is a Facebook template called “theBook” that lets you create your own private network with the same look and feel as Facebook.

DIY social network platform GROU.PS has just announced that it has acquired Social Project from MTV Networks. As part of the deal, GROU.PS will only be acquiring Social Project’s company and its users; and MTV will continue to own Social Project’s Flux social media publishing technology. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

GROU.PS, the world's most flexible white label social networking platform, today announces the alpha availability of the OpenSocial support on their platform. The announcement comes amidst Ning's anticipated closure of free networks on May 4th, 2010. GROU.PS' OpenSocial container currently renders canvas mode apps only and supports the basic PersonService.

With yesterday's news of Ning's move to eliminate free social networks on its platform, competitors are rushing to emphasize their free offerings for building a social network. Today, Grouply, a startup that's built around creating and managing online groups from Google and Yahoo Groups, is going to try to make it easy for Ning users to port their groups to Grouply's platform.

GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration has unveiled a synchronization tool that allows the group administrators on Yahoo Groups to sync with GROU.PS. So Yahoo Groups admins can incorporate functionality such as, location-based services and chat, into their platforms from GROU.PS.

GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration is launching a new tool, ActivityRank Pipelines. The feature is a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network measure and rank members’ content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to members based on these rankings.

A young San Francisco startup, Grou.ps, has launched tools to let content publishers customization discussion groups. The tools, called Elastic Modules, give publishers a lot of control over how discussion groups look and work on their sites. They can add wikis, calendars and status updates to the same page that hosts discussion threads, giving participants a way to collectively memorize important information and dates.

You've seen the calls for open identity standards and data portability. Well, Social Beans aims to create standardized "skeleton portability" across social media publishing platforms. What is "skeleton portability"? According to co-founder Emre Sokullu, "Comments, forums, wikis, blogs, rating systems, tagging, sharing and bookmarking are all common social features of today's networking sites.

Do-it-yourself social network platform GROU.PS has raised $1 million in the second tranche of its first round of funding. The new money comes from Golden Horn Ventures, the same firm that invested $1.1 million in the startup roughly a year ago.

GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration, has raised $1 million in an extended Series A round of funding from Golden Horn Ventures. The company previously raised $1.1 million in Series A funding from Golden Horn in 2008.

There are a wide variety of create-your-own social networking companies out there, with the most prominent one being Ning. But a relatively young — and very scrappy — new competitor called Grou.ps is one the rise. It is seeing 25 percent growth in unique visitors per month; some one million registered users have created 40,000 groups.

GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration is launching a new tool, ActivityRank Pipelines. The feature is a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network measure and rank members’ content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to members based on these rankings.

More money for white-labelish social networking... Grou.ps has raised a $1.1 million first round from Golden Horn Ventures, according to VentureBeat and others. The SF-based start-up offers tools for users to set up their own communities and social sites, a la Ning and plenty of others. The company is also open sourcing some of its code. See ReadWriteWeb for more on this strategic decision.

Grou.ps, a startup based in San Francisco, has secured a $1.1 Million Series A financing round in a deal led by Golden Horn Ventures. Grou.ps will also now be open-sourcing a restricted version of its code, with a view to spreading its collaboration tools. This move is based around the idea of commoditizing the platform faster and then taking advantage of the fact that they can then hire the best programmers out there. Currently Grou.ps has about 200,000 active users worldwide, after launching a public beta in April.

There are a lot of ways to collaborate online - wikis, forums, social networks - but there are very few providers that package all the tools together that a group might need. Grou.ps, a social groupware provider, aims to address that problem by providing its users one single package of integrated tools.

Grou.ps, a San Francisco start-up that lets you build a social web applications site and run it yourself, has raised $1.1 million in financing. The site includes ways to add wikis, social networking-style user profiles and other features that help groups of people easily share information.

The San Francisco based social groupware provider Grou.ps announced today that it has secured a Series A round of financing for $1.1 Million in a deal led by Golden Horn Ventures. Grou.ps has also announced that it is open sourcing a restricted version of its code under the Affero Public License.

Grou.ps, aims to be a catch-all for teams seeking collaboration. This Swiss army tool of a collaborative site includes ‘Modules’ that enable various degrees of functionality, based on your teams’ needs.

There’s seemingly no end to the number of collaboration tools out there: blogs, wikis, forums, bookmarking, photos, chat. Chances are you already use one or more of them already to keep in touch with friends or coworkers. The only problem is that all these platforms don’t work together very well.

Turkey is next in this R/WW series on top international Web apps. It's the 9th country I've profiled so far - the others have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain and China. For the following information on Turkey, I have Emre Sokullu to thank (also Honor Gunday for info on his web apps). Emre is an open source enthusiast from Istanbul, whose projects include GROU.PS, Turkix and SimpleKDE. He was over in Silicon Valley recently and not only did he attend the TechCrunch party, he also visited the Googleplex and ate quasedillas "just 10 m. away from Sergey Brin"! But I digress...